The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
Rule induction is an area of machine learning in which formal rules or principals are extracted from a set of observations. The extracted rules may represent a full scientific model of the observed data, or merely represent local patterns in the data. Some major rule induction paradigms include association rule algorithms and decision rule algorithms.